Sweeping the dust from a cosmic lobster

This image from ESOs VISTA telescope captures a celestial landscape of vast, glowing clouds of gas and tendrils of dust surrounding hot young stars. This infrared view reveals the stellar nursery known as NGC 6357 in a new light. It was taken as part of the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) survey, which is currently scanning the Milky Way in a bid to map our galaxys structure and explain how it formed. Credit: ESO/VVV Survey/D. Minniti. Acknowledgement: Ignacio Toledo
(Phys.org)—A new image from ESO's VISTA telescope captures a celestial landscape of glowing clouds of gas and tendrils of dust surrounding hot young stars. This infrared view reveals the stellar nursery known as NGC 6357 in a surprising new light. It was taken as part of a VISTA survey that is currently scanning the Milky Way in a bid to map our galaxy's structure and explain how it formed.

Located around 8000 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion), NGC 6357—sometimes nicknamed the Lobster Nebula due to its appearance in visible-light images—is a region filled with vast clouds of gas and tendrils of dark dust. These clouds are forming stars, including massive hot stars which glow a brilliant blue-white in visible light.

This image uses infrared data from ESO's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. It is just a small part of a huge survey called VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) that is imaging the central parts of the Galaxy. The new picture presents a drastically different view to that seen in visible-light images—such as the image taken with the 1.5-metre Danish telescope at La Silla—as infrared radiation can penetrate much of the covering of dust that shrouds the object.

This zoom video sequence starts with a broad view of the Milky Way. We close in on one of the regions of active star formation in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion) and a curious landscape of vast numbers of stars, glowing gas and dust is revealed. The final view shows an infrared view of NGC 6357 from the VISTA telescope. Credit: ESO/VVV Survey/D. Minniti/Digitized Sky Survey 2/Nick Risinger

One of the bright young stars in NGC 6357, known as Pismis 24-1, was thought to be the most massive star known—until it was found to actually be made up of at least three huge bright stars, each with a mass of under 100 times that of our Sun. Even so, these stars are still heavyweights—some of the most massive in our Milky Way. Pismis 24-1 is the brightest object in the Pismis 24 star cluster, a bunch of stars that are all thought to have formed at the same time within NGC 6357.

VISTA is the largest and most powerful survey telescope ever built, and is dedicated to surveying the sky in infrared light. The VVV survey is scanning the central bulge and some of the plane of our galaxy to create a huge dataset that will help astronomers to discover more about the origin, early life, and structure of the Milky Way.

Parts of NGC 6357 have also been observed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESO's Very Large Telescope. Both telescopes have produced visible-light images of various parts of this region—comparing these images with this new infrared image above shows some striking differences. In the infrared the large plumes of red-hued material are much reduced, with tendrils of pale, purple gas stretching out from the nebula in different areas.

Related Stories

(Phys.org) -- ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has taken the most detailed image so far of a spectacular part of the stellar nursery called NGC 6357. The view shows many hot young stars, glowing clouds of gas and weird dust ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Cat's Paw Nebula, NGC 6334, is a huge stellar nursery, the birthplace of hundreds of massive stars. In a magnificent new ESO image taken with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) ...

This new infrared image of the Lagoon Nebula was captured as part of a five-year study of the Milky Way using ESO's VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. This is a small piece of a much larger image of the ...

Astronomers scanning the skies as part of ESO's VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey have now obtained a spectacular picture of the Tarantula Nebula in our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. This panoramic near-infrared ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A spectacular new image of the Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253) has been taken with the ESO VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile as part of one of its first major observational campaigns. By observing ...

(Phys.org)—Globular clusters are vast, spherical clouds of old stars bound together by gravity. They are found circling the cores of galaxies, as satellites orbit the Earth. These star clumps contain very little dust and ...

Constituting over 78 % of the air we breathe, nitrogen is the element found the most often in its pure form on earth. The reason for the abundance of elemental nitrogen is the incredible stability and inertness of dinitrogen ...

Off the coast of Washington, columns of bubbles rise from the seafloor, as if evidence of a sleeping dragon lying below. But these bubbles are methane that is squeezed out of sediment and rises up through the water. The locations ...

The dramatic difference in gonad size between honey bee queens and their female workers in response to their distinct diets requires the switching on of a specific genetic program, according to a new study publishing March ...

An international team based in Ghent, Belgium (VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology) and Basel, Switzerland (University of Basel), found a link between a class of enzymes and immune signals that is rapidly triggered ...

New photonic tools for medical imaging can be used to understand the nonlinear behavior of laser light in human blood for theranostic applications. When light enters biological fluids it is quickly scattered, however, some ...

One of the ocean's little known carnivores has been allocated a new place in the evolutionary tree of life after scientists discovered its unmistakable resemblance with other sea-floor dwelling creatures.

0 comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.